Do Lips and Rock Band Play Nice?

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We put Microsoft's sexy new microphones to the compatibility test.

By Ryan Geddes

When the sing-along party game Lips was released this week for the Xbox 360, some people rejoiced at the prospect of playing a grown-up karaoke game on their Xbox 360. Others could care less about the game and just wanted to see if those awesome new Lips microphones would work with other music games. In fact, many of the comments on our recent Lips review get straight to the point: Will these microphones work with Rock Band or not?

The $70 Lips bundle includes the retail game and two wireless microphones, one black and one white, that feature accelerometers and glowing, multi-color LED lights. In Lips, you can shake or otherwise move the microphones to trigger in-game events, and the lights change color randomly as you sing. Both the microphones are completely wireless and have no USB connection.

And that's where the compatibility problem comes in. To date, Rock Band and Rock Band 2 only support USB microphones like the ones that ship with the game (although some third-party USB mics work with RB as well). We tried to get Rock Band 2 to recognize out pretty new Lips mics, but Harmonix and MTV Games' multi-instrument title wasn't having any of it.

For the Lips microphones to work with Rock Band or Guitar Hero World Tour, the games themselves will need software updates that will allow the games to recognize them. It hasn't happened yet, and there's no official word on when or if it will. So for now, you'll just have to make do with that archaic and homely Rock Band microphone.